GSP: Gymnasts are the best athletes in the world

"The gymnasts are the best athletes in the world, so when you do gymnastics, it makes you more athletic. And you're able to repeat every movement of every sport.

"I'm glad I've started gymnastics. I discovered it at the age of 29 years old. My only regret is I wish I [started it] earlier.

"I don't know what people think about gymnastics. Some people, you know, make fun of it, but, really, when you do gymnastics you find out it's so hard. This is the hardest sport I've done in my life.

"Gymnastics is going to make my career more long because it's a good [on the] therapeutic point of view. It stretches my body. It gives me more range of motion, better coordination, and better athleticism."

Recent Comments »

OK, your responses are just become repetitive now. I don't really see any reason to keep answering if people aren't going to actually read the responses and advance the discussion.If somebody posts something that adds to the content of the discussion, I'll jump back in.

The fact that you are reporting on evidence of experts in the field in your own words shows that you feel you are an expert yourself, or at the very least understand the field enough to write about it yourself. Were you only pointing to expert opinions, your thread would be filled with quotes and links to articles, but it's not. You have put things into your own words and are therefore presenting yourself as the purveyor of the opinion and supporting it by posting one link and saying that the experts agree.Besides, what's an expert anyways? One may say that we are the result of evolution while one will say we are god's creations. Each are experts but neither will agree.I'm not going to spend my time reading through articles to try to back a point that seems pretty universally agreed upon here and elsewhere...that cross training can help.

Evidence in a lab is far different that the variables that humans bring to the table imo. If GSP says that gymnastics are far harder and that it helps him then I'm willing to believe him for what he says than to say that he's full of shit because science says otherwise lol.

Balance is balance.I understand your point about doing more of A to make you better at A. But there is a point of over training and a need for balance in our lives to keep our minds sharp. There is a point where training is no longer effective. Where a normal person would go home and rest, a guy like GSP is doing gymnastics. That is all. This is not a case of he thinks he is already mastered one art and has decided to train less at that one discipline. He is still putting in the same hours, but has now decided to add gymnastics to his training. Maybe he runs less, who knows? But he said this is an addition not a substitution which I think is what you are arguing.Regardless, how can you really speak to the way gsp trains when his training regimen has seen him become the best wrestler in mma even though he has no background in it? Compare him to a Randy Couture who was close to an Olympic level wrestler, or even a Brock Lesnar. Both of whom have spent more time on their backs and GSP. Or even look at what happened to Dan Henderson when he fought Shields vs what transpired in the GSP fight.As is always the case in life, what works for one person may not produce the same results for someone else.

I have not portrayed myself as an expert. I specifically said that I'm merely reporting what I to be the received view of experts in the field.If you're not in possession of evidence that runs contrary to my claim and you're not willing to unearth such evidence, then why would you even bother participating in this thread?

I'm not going to spend my time researching something for the purposes of an argument in a forum. If you are as interested in the subject as you would have us believe, you would have already done the research yourself. And if you haven't, you can hardly call yourself an expert in the field, which is how you have portrayed yourself thus far in this thread.

And yet, I guarantee that for any other non-snowboarding activity, your balance is far, far worse than that of a person who has been doing *that* activity for 15 years.I perfectly understand he's already doing other training. He could be doing *more* of that training if he weren't devoting time and physical and mental resources to training gymnastics. I don't know how many times I have to say this.

Yet snowboarding for over 15 years has given me incredible balance in anything I do. Go figure.Also, you don't seem to understand that he is already training boxing, bjj, etc daily. He said when this story broke a year ago that he was doing this as a supplement to his regular training.

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